Belloc is out of fashion today and a discredited figure in many eyes, partly because he had a fatuous streak of anti-semitism which he brought into many of his wide range of interests. Basically he was a kind man, as well as a man with a strongly developed social conscience, and though he has become identified with the old Right, his outlook was essentially radical until he hardened into reaction in old age. Belloc's versatility - he was a historian, journalist, poet and writer of comic verse, fringe politician, polemicist, essayist, novelist - also tells against him today when specialism is the rule; plainly he wrote far too much, and too quickly. His strange marriage to an Irish-American girl whom he hardly knew, his fighting Catholicism, his distrust of big business, his inveterate and incurable touchiness, emerge in this lively but at times facile biography. (Is A.N. Wilson, like his subject, perhaps writing too much?)